The startup stories you're talking about are propagated because they appeal to a wider audience. People love lottery-level overnight success stories because that's something they can understand. Only the HN crowd can understand working just as hard, being just as passionate and only making a decent to "upper-class" living. That's not a sexy story.
That said, I don't think these types of startups don't get recognition. For example, who on HN doesn't know about patio11 and BCC? What about Peldi and Balsamiq? The stories are out there - we just choose to ignore them because Google and Facebook level is sexier.
Personally, I'm entering year three of my successful (to me) company. In fact, we just past the two year anniversary of taking our first credit card from our first subscriber and things are on the up and up. I'll be blogging about soon. Let's see how many people actually care to hear the story.
They would not appreciate publicity, but I have some buddies who could lose BCC in the petty cash drawer. A couple of them make products which don't sound all that much more lucrative than bingo cards.
There are a couple of self-made software entrepreneurs running around HN, too.
If you want to hear a lot of stories like this, come to Business of Software 2011 and ask anybody there what they do. The most common answer is "founded a software company which now employs X people and has revenues of Y million." (That crowd swings B2B more than my buddies.)
That said, I don't think these types of startups don't get recognition. For example, who on HN doesn't know about patio11 and BCC? What about Peldi and Balsamiq? The stories are out there - we just choose to ignore them because Google and Facebook level is sexier.
Personally, I'm entering year three of my successful (to me) company. In fact, we just past the two year anniversary of taking our first credit card from our first subscriber and things are on the up and up. I'll be blogging about soon. Let's see how many people actually care to hear the story.